27 February 2017 2:13 PM

And still the political experts drone on about Jeremy Corbyn and the future of the Labour Party. They say ‘Labour can’t win an election with Jeremy Corbyn as its leader.’

This is quite true. But it is fatuous to say it. For much more important is the fact that Labour could not win an election with any conceivable leader.

Labour’s collapse in Scotland, combined with its long-term decay in the South of England, means that it cannot possibly govern on its own unless there is some sort of cataclysm (such as a collapse of Sterling accompanied by hyper-inflation, mass unemployment, war or pestilence) which wholly changes the British political landscape.

Labour’s only future lies in some sort of alliance , formal or informal, with the SNP. That, by contrast, is perfectly possible and I am amazed people don’t think about it more, now that the English minority parties are so small and ineffectual. Mr Corbyn’s old-fashioned statist policies are still very popular in Scotland, as is his view of foreign policy. Provided he keeps quiet about his sympathy for our exit from the EU, he might be able to reach a perfectly good arrangement with Ms Sturgeon and Mr Salmond.

Indeed, I’d guess the Corbynites have much more in common with the SNP than do his Blairite opponents. They, after all, mistakenly pursued devolution in the belief it would put an end to the nationalists. This must count as one of the biggest political blunders of modern times. And the Blairites’ well-oiled Eurocommunist cultural revolution probably looks a bit poncey to Scottish leftists people whose idea of socialism still has its origins in raw coalfield Communism and shipyard Bolshevism,

The subject is made even more complicated by the ‘Scotland in Europe’ policy of the SNP, which plainly hoped to achieve independence from London by seeking dependence on Brussels and Frankfurt instead. This path is now blocked by the UK’s exit from the EU(if it ever actually happens). Actual independence from London, with no source of subsidy or national defence or foreign diplomatic representation, a stand-alone currency and borders to defend is a far bigger leap in the dark than achieving equal status with, say, Lithuania or Slovenia (flag, anthem, seat at table in Brussels, er, that’s it).

But that’s a diversion from the basic Labour problem. The big money which once kept New Labour in being has all deserted to the Tories, who have become New Labour (without actually understanding the project on which they are engaged, but then most of New Labour including poor, dim Anthony, were in the same fix). And, as I pointed out in this analysis of the 2015 election, http://dailym.ai/2lMAhvq, were it not for the deployment of big money and dark arts, Labour would have done significantly better, and the Tories worse, in that contest. The Lib Dems would also have survived as a sizeable Parliamentary faction.

Big money, combined with BBC favour under the Broadcasting rules, and of course the ‘mandate of heaven’ which decides which way most of the media will go, is now far more important in British elections than it used to be. The old system of volunteer workers and mass membership parties has almost completely died. Union money, once a significant counter-balance to the Tories’ fundraising powers, now simply isn’t as big as the huge donors that bankrolled the Blair years, and the hedge fund billions that keep the New Tories afloat.

Anyway, by-elections were never much use as a barometer of anything. I used to cover lots of them, and they were all festivals of the oppressed, in which people started from their usual allegiances to have a bit of fun. That doesn’t stop people using them to get what they want. The late Gerald Kaufman ( as I can now reveal) told me and others over a long-ago and utterly hilarious lunch-table that Labour’s anti-Michael Foot faction had been hoping with all their might that Labour would lose the March 1983 Darlington by-election, which I had spent some time reporting for my then newspaper, making the acquaintance of the man now known as Sir Michael Fallon, Secretary of State for Defence, then the youthful Tory candidate. Alas, the SDP candidate (who had been in the lead) made a fool of himself at a televised hustings, and Labour’s Oswald (Ossie) O’ Brien scored an unexpected triumph. This didn’t actually mean that Labour was on the road to recovery. It was all very local.

Plans a for a putsch against the late Michael Foot (who would have been replaced by the late Denis Healey) had to be scrapped at the last moment, and Foot duly led his party to a romantic disaster in June that year. I don’t think Denis Healey could possibly have won, or even done all that much better. The SDP-Liberal Alliance, at that time, was at the height of its strength and Healey, though an effective fighter, didn’t really have much of an answer to them. The Royal Navy had saved the late Margaret Thatcher’s bacon in the Falklands the year before, and she had taken the political credit which that fine fighting service actually deserved. But anyway, you get the point.

As for Mr Corbyn, what can he do? He has been lawfully and justly elected according to the rules of his party. If anyone challenges him again, he will win again. Parties which have been driven into the powerless margins tend to indulge themselves a bit, as the irresponsibility is also a kind of freedom.

And who can feel sorry for all the ambitious Blairites, who joined New Labour back in the Blair-Brown years , sure that they would move smoothly up to ministerial office, and now finding themselves seething on Mr Corbyn’s back-benches, all hope of preferment gone? Not I, anyway.

No wonder so many of them are drifting off to do other things. Pure reason would tell them to join the Tories, who now stand for all the things New Labour used to stand for, national indebtedness, social and moral revolution and globalism, enlivened by occasional crazy foreign wars. But of course tribal feeling (which has nothing to do with politics) prevents them from crossing the floor. It’s not, I’d guess, that *they* have much tribal feeling. But their voters in their constituencies do, and won’t forgive them. It’s a pity there aren’t enough museums to go round, for them all to find new jobs.

Perhaps they’re hoping (not unreasonably) for a smash, in which everything will change again. The Tories , after all, are not exactly strong or united. It’s possible (watch this space) that they may even lose their majority before this Parliament is over. As for unity, it’s completely artificial, as is Mrs May’s supposed iron control. Like John major before her, she has the job because She’s not david Cameron or Al ‘Boris’ Johnson. The moment it’s safe for Mr Johnson, in particular, to seek high office again, Mrs May’s position is in jeopardy. But as things stand, nobody at the top of the Tory party wants the job of negotiating an exit they don’t believe in.

Let her make a hash of it ( as she may well) and then her rather unearned reputation for steely competence will vanish in a morning. I still don’t think anyone realises just how perilous these negotiations are going to be, and how bad a mess we’re already making of them ( a mess which I think results from Mrs May wanting to persuade anti-EU voters that she can be trusted by them even though she doesn’t agree with them) . Meanwhile, the 52% who voted Leave have no organised voice or vote in Parliament f9or when things get awkward, as they will. But fear of their anger motivates all wise MPs, who now seek to outdo each other in enthusiasm for a project most of them don’t support. This is not, actually, a very good basis for action. If you genuinely believe in a cause, you can make intelligent compromises in pursuit of your ultimate goal. If you don’t, you won’t dare. Jeremy Corbyn’s difficulties are as nothing compared to those of Chairman May.

26 February 2017 12:30 AM

The campaign to get rid of marriage has not gone away. Civil partnerships for heterosexuals were not thrown out by the Appeal Court last week, only put off till later. They will come.

In fact, after 20 years of New Labour government (some of it nominally Tory) we can now look back and survey the smoking ruins of marriage. It’s not that the New Labour radicals and their Tory imitators wrecked marriage on their own. It’s just that they have more or less finished it off.

The very words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ have been erased from official forms and even from normal conversation. We all have partners now, whether we want to or not.

Divorce figures have fallen only because so many couples don’t get married in the first place. The marriage statistics show that more and more people simply aren’t bothering to make any sort of legal commitment at all before setting up home and starting a family.

As Lady Justice Hale, now tipped to be boss of the Supreme Court, said in 1982: ‘Family law now makes no attempt to buttress the stability of marriage or any other union,’ adding ‘the piecemeal erosion of the distinction between marriage and non-marital cohabitation may be expected to continue.’ And how.

Marriage has a strange, unique status in the courts. If you break a contract with your building society or a car leasing company, the law will come down against you.

If you break the marriage contract, the law will take your side and will eventually throw the other party out of the marital home if she or he insists on sticking to the original deal. Odd, eh? It’s amazing how many men, the usual victims of this strange arrangement, still get married at all.

I’d guess that marriage figures are artificially swollen each year by an unknown but large number of fake weddings, aimed at getting round immigration laws. Who can say? By their nature, such things aren’t always easy to detect.

But the liberal-thinking classes have for decades loathed and sought to undermine marriage. They hate it as a conservative, religious tradition which accepts that men and women are different, which is intensely private and gets in the way of the enlightened, paternal state they love so much.

The Left’s new allies, globalist commerce, also hate marriage (especially the sort where the mother stays at home) because it stops them from employing women as cheap, pliant labour and turning them into incessant consumers. This is a long campaign.

The radical Professor Edmund Leach, awarded the influential Reith lectures by the ‘impartial’ BBC, sneered back in 1967 that ‘the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents’.

He spoke of ‘parents and children huddled together in their loneliness’ and suggested children grow up in larger, more relaxed domestic groups, ‘something like an Israeli kibbutz, perhaps, or a Chinese commune’. Yes, he really said that.

Political radicals sympathised with this view, but in frontline politics they tended to get married. You’ll have to guess why, but I draw your attention to the marriage of Ed Miliband to the mother of his children, Justine, in May 2011, soon after he rather unexpectedly became leader of the Labour Party.

Compare and contrast them with New Labour’s true genius and mastermind, Alastair Campbell, and the mother of his children, Fiona Millar, the great apostle of comprehensive schools.

At the 2001 memorial service for Tony Benn’s wife Caroline, Fiona expressed delight at the singing of the Communist anthem, The Internationale, saying: ‘Great to hear language we aren’t allowed to use any longer.’

These two lifelong radicals have never married.

Nor, of course, have many similar sorts in the media and other areas of life where there is no pressure from spin doctors to do so. You must have noticed this.

It is a deliberate revolution, not an accident of nature.

I doubt most people ever even realised it was going on, but will we be better off when it is – as it soon will be – triumphant?

********

I did warn you about Ms Dick...

So the Chief Commissar of Political Correctness, Ms Cressida Dick, has overcome her unappealing record to be made Britain’s most senior police officer.

The media, who might have been expected to have reservations about her, swallowed them.

Jean Charles de Menezes’s family were left almost alone to worry about her role in his death in a botched police shooting.

Nobody seemed bothered about her liking for ludicrous, indefensible dawn raids on the homes of journalists, either. Oh well.

I told you so, long ago. On November 17, 2002, I wrote on this page: ‘Remember the name Cressida Dick. Commander Dick, I here predict, will be the first woman Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. She is the perfect politically correct copper.’

Don’t you ever wonder what force or power it is that propels such people unstoppably upwards?

*******

UKIP, the Dad’s Army of British politics, marches rapidly backwards away from success.

Its mistakes are too many to list, but trying to attack Labour and giving up the assault on the real enemy, the Tories, may well have had something to do with it.

********

SS-GB NEEDS A DOSE OF GERMAN EFFICIENCY

It is time for a Campaign for Real Drama. Len Deighton’s clever book, SS-GB, would make a terrific TV series. Alas, the modern BBC isn’t capable of doing that.

It isn’t just because it favours mumbling over talking. I could hardly hear what the actors were saying because my own teeth were grinding in rage and disapproval.

But I listened to the whole thing again through some top-notch headphones, and gathered I hadn’t missed much.

It is just so slapdash. Deighton’s carefully researched and brilliantly imagined idea, a despairing London under German occupation after a shocking defeat, actually made me miserable when I first read it because it was so believable.

But this lot can’t even get their own fictional details right. The central character, Douglas Archer, is called Inspector by a reporter, Chief Superintendent by himself and Superintendent by his German boss and a German journalist. His rank continues to veer wildly up and down.

The SS chief who has supposedly handpicked him later calls him Inspector. In less than two minutes he has promoted him to Superintendent, but within 30 seconds he has demoted him back to Inspector.

I thought these Nazis, with their Sturmbannfuhrers and Obergruppenfuhrers, were supposed to be sticklers for rank.

I haven’t room to list all the incredible and unlikely moments.

But the sheer terror of a country in which you could be shot for fiddling your fuel coupons, or deported to do slave labour at a moment’s notice, is simply not evoked.

Sinister music, which often blots out the dialogue, is no substitute for real drama.

Instead there is an extraordinarily stupid and incredible scene in which a supposedly passionate resistance member wraps her naked body in a Nazi flag and stands on a London hotel balcony in mid-November.

There is also an exposed willy (how avant-garde!) and the tedious use of cigarettes (I counted 13 lit in an hour, despite tight rationing by the Nazis) to show we are in the past.

What a missed opportunity.

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22 February 2017 2:18 PM

It is amazing how many times I am confronted at debates, on the Internet and in discussions with apparently intelligent people, with the same stupid arguments for weakening the drug laws.

It’s plain that those who use them haven’t thought about them. I wonder where they pick them up. Is it at school, in PHSE classes? Or from Christmas crackers? Or have the billionaire drug lobby found some other way of planting them in the minds of millions, though movies, comedians, celebrity endorsement and so on?

Anyway, I felt the time had come to provide a concise riposte to these thought-free claims, in the hope that those who are capable of thinking will be able to see through them. Many, of course, want to believe any old drivel that supports their personal desires. For them, I have no antidote.

Idiotic argument No 1:'MARIJUANA USE IS A VICTIMLESS CRIME'

Only if you do it on a desert island, quite alone, and nobody loves you. In all other cases, the user runs the risk of doing himself serious harm (see below on correlation between cannabis use and mental illness). And if he does, his family will be terribly grieved and quite possibly forced to look after him, and pay for his upkeep for the rest of this natural life. They are victims. Alternatively, the user may end up in a mental hospital, expensively cared for at the charge of the taxpayer, who is also his victim. Even so his family’s grief and distress will last for as long as they live.

'Correlation is not causation, so there !'

No, correlation is not *necessarily* causation. But it is not necessarily *not* causation either. It is the foundation of epidemiology (see the famous case in which Cholera was linked to foul water supplies) and the starting point of investigation. And it is often the best early indication we get of a connection (such as that between smoking and lung cancer) whose detailed operation may take many decades to find and describe. Should we have done nothing to discourage smoking despite the known correlation between smoking and Cancer? Surely only Big Tobacco would take that view. Those who take the same complacent view about the marijuana link to mental illness are very similar to Big Tobacco, and in some cases have similar motives. It is shocking irresponsibility, especially since legalisation of marijuana, once achieved, will be as irreversible as legalisation of alcohol and legalisation of tobacco.

Many studies, from the Swedish Army survey to the Dunedin study, plus the work of Professor Sir Robin Murray mentioned elsewhere in this article, have shown that cannabis use is correlated with mental illness of various kinds. Mental illness, I should say here, is easy to define as the overthrow or weakening of the patient's reason. But I do not use various pseudo-scientific terms such as 'psychosis' or 'schizophrenia', since these seem to me to lack any objective measure, and cannot be compared to physical diseases which can be reliably diagnosed by objective methods.

Stupid stoners respond to this by saying that breathing and eating bread are also correlated with mental illness. But this is just wilful point-missing. These are not meaningful correlations. But it is surely unsurprising if a drug which acts powerfully on the brain is associated with mental disturbance; just as it is not surprising that repeatedly inhaling clouds of smoke from burning vegetable matter is associated with lung and bronchial problems.

The stupidest argument in the world: 'WOT ABAHT ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO, THEN, EH? I BET YOU LIKE A DRINK. HYPOCRITE!'

Well, what about alcohol and tobacco? Both are very dangerous to their users and do terrible harm. If you support their legal status, or consume either or both, surely you are inconsistent and a hypocrite?

Answer: Not at all. I drink a little wine and the occasional glass of beer. Very occasionally I might drink a small measure of spirits. There is no hypocrisy in this. My opponents use an illegal drug and campaign for its legalisation to suit themselves. I do nothing of the kind. If alcohol were illegal I would not buy or consume it, nor would I campaign for it to be legalised. If I did campaign for it to be legalised, I would certainly not break the law I was campaigning to change, as so many cannabis legalisers do.

As it happens, I regard heavy and habitual drinking as scourges and sources of misery, so I favour the tightest legal limitations on its sale which are achievable. I support the reintroduction of the strict alcohol licensing laws which existed until the Tory and Labour parties combined to destroy them between 1985 and 2000. Under those laws, pubs were closed for most of the day, and closed for even longer on Sundays, and a special licence was necessary to sell alcohol anywhere else. I have no doubt that heavy drinking has hugely increased since these laws were abandoned. I have seen the terrible consequences of habitual heavy drinking, and can see the case for prohibiting alcohol entirely. However, I do not think this is practicable. Banning things which have been legal for many centuries and also in mass use (including TV advertising and open sale in high streets) is impracticable.

Such laws cannot be enforced as millions will know that until recently the government and the police took the opposite view, and will regard the change as inconsistent and dubious.

What did 'Prohibition' really involve?

It would also be extremely difficult to prosecute. US alcohol ‘prohibition’ is often wrongly regarded as a model for this It is not a good example. Millions of recent immigrants viewed the prohibition law (mainly the result of lobbying by feminists) as a political attack on their heritage and culture. Very small resources were devoted to enforcing it. The USA has long, unpatrollable coastlines and borders and vast unpoliced internal spaces. Perhaps most significant of all, the law did not punish possession (and therefore use) of alcoholic drinks.

This enfeebled it from the start, as if you do not interdict demand you are wasting your time interdicting supply. This is the basic flaw in our cannabis laws, where the supposedly severe penalties for possession are seldom if ever invoked . The police avoid arresting, the CPS avoids charging and the courts avoid punishing offenders. Where they do, it is generally because it is a repeat offence and linked with another crime, or has been used as an easily proven charge (thanks to unquestionable forensics) against someone the authorities want to punish for something else which they cannot easily prove in court.

A better example of failed alcohol prohibition is modern-day Iran, where a country which formerly permitted drinking now seeks to suppress it. Any visitor to Iran is quickly aware that this law is not effectively enforced, and has utterly failed. And this failure takes place in a police state without any of the safeguards and restraints on authority in the USA.

What about smoking then?

Suppressing smoking has been slow, cautious and late. It had to be. It was legal for centuries, and a mass habit.

As for smoking, the slow crabwise approach of the authorities, long after it was clear that cigarettes were an intolerable health hazard that should never have been permitted in the first place, shows how difficult it is to act against organised greed unless you have the law behind you already.

To begin with the huge commercial power of Big Tobacco more or less prevented any action at all. When action did take place it was by tiny slow degrees. And it is still legal to sell cigarettes in shops, a freedom allowed to no comparable substance (dangerous when used according to the manufacturers’ instructions). I support the current measures to discourage its use and ban it from public places (measures backed by civil legal sanctions).

These are reasonably effective though far from wholly successful. This dangerous substance remains on open legal sale and is still legally promoted through product placement and other subtle methods. It would have been far better had it never been legal or in mass use in the first place. The idea that , by legalising marijuana, we would make it possible to 'regulate' it is shown by the tobacco example to be false. Once legalised, so allowing open sale and advertising, use is so widespread that it is almost impossible to stamp out. And, however regulated they may be, cigarettes remain potentially lethal to many of those who smoke them. Don't wait for the correlation between dope and mental illness to be confirmed as causation. Keep the laws against marijuana so that we aren't, 50 years hence, struggling to cram this evil genie back into its bottle.

A lesson for legalisers

This must surely be a lesson for legalisers. Imagine, were marijuana to be legal and in mass use, as the Billionaire Big Dope lobby …

want it to be in the Western world, advertised (as permitted in the recent California Proposition 64) and in mass use, instead of (as it still is now) restricted to a comparatively small part of the population – comparatively small set beside the huge alcohol and cigarette markets.

The young think they are immortal

The existing law still restrains many people, especially the young, from using marijuana either at all or habitually. Were it to be properly enforced, it would be a powerful counterforce , set against the immense peer pressure in schools and colleges, for the young to take up marijuana. Young people think they are immortal and laugh at (often exaggerated) claims that drugs will kill them. Many presumably think that the mental illness increasingly correlated with marijuana use….

….will not trouble them. But the realistic immediate prospect of a criminal record, of being banned forever from travelling to the USA, of limitless career damage (all consequences of criminal prosecution for possession, were it to be reintroduced) would do so, especially if they knew of people to whom this had happened.

This is the case in both Japan and South Korea, where laws are strongly enforced against drug possession, and use is also much lower. Before 1971, when British drug laws were more stringent and more enforced, drug use was also much lower in Britain. The idea that the Japanese and South Korean difference is ‘cultural’ is fatuous. ‘Culture’ on such matters is greatly influenced by law. Japan’s laws were introduced in response to widespread amphetamine use in the post-war period, a fact which rather undermines the fact that Japan’s ‘culture’ is responsible for its lower drug use. Weak drug laws have hugely changed British culture’ since 1971.

See the November 2014 Home Office study on differing responses to the drug problem around the world

'Japan: We visited Japan, which operates a strong enforcement-led approach to drug misuse, often regarded as a ‘zero tolerance’ policy. Substances are more strictly controlled than in many other countries. Some products that are available over the counter as cold and flu remedies in the UK are banned. Possession of even small amounts of drugs is punishable by lengthy imprisonment.'

And p.51, which sneakily admits that tougher enforcement is accompanied by lower use (a conclusion perhaps unwelcome to the sponsors of this particular document) but then asserts, without a scrap of evidence, that this is really because of a different 'culture'), the 'culture' excuse is advanced) :

'The ‘zero tolerance’ policies in Sweden and Japan [NB: The study does not mention South Korea, and overstates the level of enforcement in Sweden which can hardly be described as 'zero tolerance' or equated with Japanese practice] reflect strong cultural disapproval of drug taking. In Sweden, successive reforms which have toughened the legislative response to drug use have been guided by public opinion and by influential lobby groups such as the ‘Association for a Drug-free Society’. In Japan, where cultural conformity is traditionally valued, drug use is subject to a degree of stigma. In this context, it is difficult to tell whether low levels of drug use (my emphasis) are a consequence of legislation, or a product of the same cultural attitudes that have informed the zero-tolerance approach.

The world’s stupidest argument

All the above make it plain that the ‘what about alcohol and tobacco’ plaint is in fact the World’s Stupidest Argument. (#WorldsStupidestArgument) Not only is there no hypocrisy. Not only am I and other campaigners for stringent drug laws quite ready to concede that these are highly dangerous drugs which should be as heavily restricted as possible. But the ‘US prohibition failed’ slogan is in fact a warning to Western society that, once marijuana is legal, it will be effectively impossible ever to ban marijuana again, even if the warnings of many experts turn out to be true, and the correlation between its use and lifelong mental illness turns out to be meaningful and major.

'WHY ALLOW CRIMINALS TO CONTROL THE TRADE? MAKING IT LEGAL WOULD DRIVE THEM OUT'

This is demonstrably untrue. Alcohol and tobacco (see above) are legal. Yet in Britain, HM Revenue and Customs use huge resources trying to combat the criminal gangs which smuggle illicit cigarettes into the country, or who manufacture and distribute illicit alcohol. This is because they are very heavily taxed, just as legal marijuana would be very heavily taxed if it were on open sale. In fact it is already being taxed in Colorado, one of the US states which has legalised it. Illegal sellers still operate there, trading successfully, at well under the taxed price in legal outlets. We can safely assume this would be the case under general legalisation.

All crime is caused by law

In any case, no thought has gone into this. All crime is caused by law. To have law means to have crime. If you have no law, you will have no crime. But think what this means in reality. If we banned nothing, we’d need no police, courts or prisons. But we’d also live in much worse, more dangerous and unpleasant world. We ban things because they are dangerous or have other evil effects.

Why are cynical businessmen so much better than criminal gangs?

Why exactly are cynical businessmen better than criminal gangs? Dope legalisers back Billionaire Big Dope, while condemning cynical cartels of the same kind - Big Pharma, Fast Food and soft drinks behemoths, the alcohol giants, Big Oil and the arms trade. Such businessmen, following the example of Big Tobacco, can wrap their dangerous products in pretty packets and sell them in shops and on the internet, they can in some cases get health services to prescribe their products to millions, and advertise them on TV and in cinemas. Or they can lobby states into fighting wars for them and helping them sell their dangerous products in unstable places. Why are they so much more desirable than criminals? Criminals cannot do these things, and can reach many fewer people than cynical businessmen.

Just because it’s regulated, doesn’t mean it’s safe.

Does the fact that cigarettes and alcohol are sold openly and ‘regulated’ mean they are safe to use and will not harm you? Don't. Be. Silly.

Why then would 'regulation' of drugs, mean that legalised drugs were safe to use and would not harm you? By ‘regulating’ them, society and the state would be offering a reassurance they were not entitled to give. They would be looking the other way while something inherently dangerous was put on open sale. I can see why a greed merchant might accept this argument. But most marijuana legalisers regard themselves as being opposed to corporate cynicism. Why, I ask again, are they outraged at the sale of sugary drinks and greasy burgers to innocent children, but happy to ally themselves with the mighty lobby of Big Dope?

Oh, and we're told that handing over a lucrative substance to legitimate business means the end of violence. Or does it mean the state getting (violently?) involved in securing supplies, as it has done over oil. Is this inconceivable?

'LEGALISING DRUGS WOULD END THE MURDER AND CARTELS IN DRUG PRODUCING COUNTRIES'

I am not quite sure why. Perhaps it might instead lead to international wars, such as those which now take place over oil, for prime drug-producing territory. But the cause of the trouble in these countries comes from the rivers of money, dollars, euros and pounds, which are sent on drugs by spoiled, selfish westerners. Their role is exactly the same as that of those who spend their money on trafficked prostitutes. They finance and maintain a wicked, immoral trade by paying for it.

Meet The Real Mr Big - it’s You

These are the people who seek the dangerous, selfish pleasures of drugs. These are the real Mr Bigs of the drug trade. Without the cash they willingly hand over for their chemical joy, there would be no cartels, no smuggling, no mules, no gang wars.

This is why it is so astonishing that the people at the heart of the drug trade, the buyers and users, are the only ones in whom the law is utterly uninterested. If they were systematically arrested and prosecuted, the drug trade would rapidly dwindle, most of all in the places now enslaved by it.

'BUT YOU CAN’T PUT HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE IN PRISON'

No, you can’t. The point of prison is to deter. Once it is clear that a crime is being taken seriously, its incidence falls ( see Japan and South Korea and pre-1971 Britain). A fairly small number of high-profile arrests and prosecutions, and the use by police of informers on a large scale so that nobody knew if they were in fact buying from a police nark, would rapidly persuade most people that drug abuse wasn’t worth the risk. And if everyone had heard of someone who *had* been jailed for drug possession, they’d change their behaviour. Drug abuse is a crime of affluence and choice. Anyone can stop committing it if he wants to. Nobody needs to do it.

Dictators and despots (and any government fond of repression and lying) love having stupefied subjects. They’re easier to fool, and to push around

Self-stupefaction is not some mighty freedom, like the freedoms of speech, thought and assembly. It is rather the opposite. Any tyrant would be glad to have a stupefied, compliant and credulous population, accepting what it was told and too passive and flaccid to resist. See Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, in which the masses are controlled by the pleasure-drug Soma. Mostly, they just take it and are apathetic and stupefied. But on one occasion a riot is quelled by the police spraying the protestors with Soma.

'But Marijuana is a useful medicine, isn’t it?'

Is it? There have been a few attempts to use its active ingredients in medicines, but they have not been especially successful. It is extremely hard to test it rigorously (in double-blind tests against inert placebos) because the guinea-pigs will instantly know if they have been given the real thing or the dummy.

Also euphoria and numbness are not the same as medical relief, or brandy would be a medicine. Then again, remember that correlation with mental illness. No drug is any safer than its side-effects. Thalidomide was quite effective against morning sickness among pregnant women. But its appalling side-effects made that benefit irrelevant. What ailment is so bad that you would risk lifelong mental illness in the search for cure or alleviation?

Finally, I have yet to meet a ‘medical marijuana’ campaigner who was not working alongside the general campaign for recreational legalisation. No serious campaign for medical use would do this, as it instantly makes it much less likely that anyone will listen or accede. I don’t question the *possibility* that the ingredients of marijuana may one day be shown to have a valid medical use. But I would take it much more seriously of those who make this claim were not allied to general legalisation campaigns.

It is also worth noting that Keith Stroup, one of the USA’s most prominent and distinguished campaigners for marijuana legalisation , said in 1979 (in an interview with the American university newspaper ‘The Emory Wheel’ of which I have seen the original) that he hoped to use medical marijuana as a red herring to get pot a good name. I suspect he now regrets his candour among friends, but I also suspect that it was true then and remains true now. And until I meet a ‘medical marijuana’ campaigner who actively denounces, and distances himself from, the general legalisation campaign, I will continue to believe this.

But you don't want to ban rock-climbing, mountain-climbing or motorbikes

No, though if motorbikes *were* banned I might well oppose a campaign to legalise them. I know from personal experience that 17-year-olds, for instance, shouldn't be allowed to ride them.

There are two things wrong with this argument. the first is that rock-climbing and motorbikes are and always have been legal, but marijuana is illegal , and legalisation (see above) is almost certainly irreversible if it comes about. Why spit on your luck? Just because some dangerous things are legal, it is not an argument for making another dangerous thing legal. Or if it is, I cannot see why.

The other is that dangerous self-stupefaction is not really comparable to dangerous activities such as these. Climbing or riding are both activities which can be learned and in which experience and dedication contribute to safety and achievement. The better you are at them, the safer you are. I also think they make those who do them better people than they otherwise would be, like all activities demanding courage, dedication, effort and self-discipline.

No such claim can be made for the smoking of marijuana.

'Portugal and the Netherlands have shown that relaxing the law works!'

Have they? How? Holland's limited decriminalisation of marijuana is much less extensive, in reality, than Britain's de facto decriminalisation spread over 40 years and affecting the entire country, and the UK is generally seen as a place with many serious drug problems. The claims made for Portugal are disputed both in Portugal and among researchers outside the country. Lifetime drug use in Portugal has actually risen. As far as I know, no work has been done on the incidence of mental illness there among drug users. HIV infection rates among drug abusers are not really a very good indicator of the total success of a policy. It's also worth pointing out that, like many supposedly 'enlightened' states which have greatly relaxed their drug laws, Portugal was not famous for tough enforcement before the change. The same, by the way, is true of Uruguay.

As for those countries which offer 'addicts' supplies of substitute drugs, and the claims made for crime reduction following this, people should notice that what has really happened is that the state has become a drug enabler, mugging taxpayers to pay for the drug habits of self-indulgent criminals. Whether you rejoice over this, or do not, will depend on your moral and political opinions. But it can hardly be presented as an ideal solution.

Supposed health benefits following the Portuguese drug law changes also coincided with other changes in Portugal's health services (correlation is not necessarily causation, as I so often point out). Even enthusiasts for the policy will, if pressed, admit this fact.

Also note that the London'Times' reported on Monday 20th February 2017 that 'Police warnings and fixed penalty notices for cannabis possession have more than halved in four years, leading to claims that the drug is being effectively decriminalised . This follows many reports of UK police forces openly saying they will no longer pursue cases of drug possession.'

*****For full details of these arguments, backed by research, please consult my 2012 book 'The War We Never Fought', published by Bloomsbury, which any library will get for you or (if you prefer) is available to purchase in all formats, including audio. ******

Yet most people vaguely believe the lemming story to be true. It's become quite an important part of their thinking and they are unwilling to let it go.

Say to them that lemmings don’t actually have a mass death-wish, and they will cry out in astonishment and disbelief. Could a similar delusion be affecting views on NATO expansion, supposedly caused by the shivering fear of tiny, furry states cowering on the edge of the Russian bear-pit, begging for our supposedly mighty protection?

Well, that is certainly what almost everyone thinks now, though the distinguished historian Professor Richard Sakwa, of the University of Kent, says in his excellent and courageous book ‘Frontline Ukraine’ that NATO’s expansion has in fact created the very fear against which it claims to be protecting its new members. Let us see.

WE won't buy your tomatoes. Fancy a nuclear umbrella instead?

The first Warsaw Pact country to join NATO was East Germany (the DDR) , which became a NATO member by being absorbed into the Federal Republic in 1990. Amusingly it had always been a de facto member of the Common Market/EU because West Germany refused to maintain a customs barrier between the two states. Three former Warsaw Pact states (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) joined NATO in 1999. See if you can find any suggestion, between 1989, when they got their freedom, and 1999, that Russia posed any threat to them, or that anyone was complaining of any such threat.

As I recall, at that time, Russia was (as it is now) economically prostrate and pitifully weak in conventional military terms, easily outnumbered in men and money by NATO as a whole. It also had no actual border with the Czech Republic. Nor did Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland (unless you count the exclave at Kaliningrad), Romania or Bulgaria.

I can recall the joke being told at the time that NATO membership was given to these states as a consolation prize, after the EU told them to wait outside. They had to wait till May 2004 to join the EU, along with Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in 2007, by which time it had almost completely abandoned any attempts to demand economic and political rigour in its new members and had become openly an instrument of American power in Europe.

Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO in March 2004, again as deficit countries, that is to say, they required much more in the way of commitment than they provided in the way of effective force. In the same way most of the EU’s new members demanded far more than they could possibly contribute, and in several cases could only be said to reach EU standards of legality and transparency if the EU closed both its eyes and held its nose.

Did I see the joke ‘We’ve given them our nuclear umbrella because we don’t want to buy their tomatoes’ in the ‘Economist? I haven’t the archive access to find it, but I can’t think where else I got it from. The problem with these countries was that leaving the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, and exposing themselves to the icy winds of capitalism, wasn’t actually quite as good as they had hoped it would be.

Communist education had in fact been quite good.

The old industries and their guaranteed jobs collapsed.Their former markets, for agricultural produce and manufactured goods, were also gone. But they had one huge advantage. Schooling and skill-training under Communism had been surprisingly good, often more rigorous than its western equivalent. They were sources of well-educated cheap labour (and they still are, Poland exports huge amounts of unemployment in the form of low-paid migrant workers, Germany shifted a lot of manufacture to the Czech Republic etc). Most of them would be in a terrible mess had they not latched on to various subsidy teats in the West. Poland’s EU subsidy is gigantic, for instance. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/01/eu-poland-10-years-economic

Again, I can recall, at that time, no evidence of any kind that Russia was menacing these countries or making territorial demands upon them. It couldn’t if it wanted to.

‘The picture we are building up in our minds of a revanchist Russia is as absurd as their picture of an aggressive and encircling West. Russian military expenditure is one tenth of NATO’s and their economy one twentieth.’

If Russia wanted to attack the Baltics, it had years to do so

I might add that the three Baltic Republics escaped Moscow’s control in 1991. After the stupid and failed KGB-inspired displays in Riga and Vilnius in January that year, which I witnessed, no further attempt was made to stop them. In the time between their departure and their supposedly frightened scurry under Auntie NATO’s skirts 13 years later. (Thirteen years!) , there was no attempt made by Moscow to reassert control, despite (in two of the Baltic states) some rather stupid and indefensible treatment of the Russian minorities there. Perhaps they wish they had acted. As the Baltic States’ membership of NATO now puts Western forces in Narva 85 miles from St Petersburg, about the same difference as Coventry is from London. We, who are surrounded by deep salt water, would gasp if any of our major cities (especially one which suffered a lengthy enemy siege in living memory) were within such a short distance of the forces of an increasingly hostile alliance.

Now I must once again mention Peter Conradi’s very interesting new book ‘Who Lost Russia’, which will eventually require a full posting here in its own right. Mr Conradi, a distinguished former Moscow foreign co0rrepondent, has looked into the origins of NATO expansion and what he found is devastating.

First, he notes that the great US diplomat George Kennan, the architect of the whole US Cold War policy, opposed NATO expansion as mistaken. In 1947, in dealing with the USSR, he had taken a wholly different view, begging a complacent Washington, stuffed with Soviet fellow-travellers, to grasp that Stalin was not its friend

He said: ‘the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies ... Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.’

The father of the Cold War opposed NATO expansion

But that was because he grasped that post 1991 Russia was wholly different from the Soviet Union.

but here’s an example: ‘''I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,'' said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ''I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.(my emphasis) This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.''

He added: ‘ ''I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.”’ (My emphasis)

On 7th February 1997, the London Times, now a keen enthusiast for the ‘New Cold War’ took a very different view. It ran a leading article supporting Mr Kennan.

It said of him’ In measured terms, and with much wisdom, he used the pages of The New York Times to analyse and then denounce the course Mr Clinton had set as "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era." Mr Kennan will be 93 in nine days time. He is the last survivor of the generation which, in Dean Acheson's memorable description, was present at the creation of the superpower struggle. Three years before Madeleine Albright was born he started service at the American Embassy in Moscow. In 1946, months before President Clinton drew his first breath, he had sent his "long telegram" back to Washington warning his then still starry-eyed political masters about the real intentions and threat of Stalinist Russia...’

‘...Europe lives under the liberty he predicted then. When such a man declares so starkly that Nato expansion would destabilise Russian democracy and "restore the atmosphere of the Cold War", it should send a warning to all. When he asks why East-West relations should "become centred on the question of who would be allied with whom and by implication against whom in some fanciful, totally unforeseeable and most improbable future military conflict", that demands a convincing answer.’

‘As Mr Kennan correctly notes, at some moment over the past 12 months, with no real warning, this radical redesign of Nato's role moved from general proposition to the edge of policy. It did so despite little public deliberation in this continent and virtually none at all in North America. Mr Clinton's conversion seems to have been inspired more by the desire to please voters of Polish descent in Michigan than any serious military calculation.’

They said the policy ‘risks undermining the credibility of Nato, weakening the hand of reformers in Russia, and reducing - not enhancing - the real security of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe.‘ They wouldn't say that now.

So what happened to Western policy. Why was Bill Clinton, a man unversed in and ignorant of foreign policy, persuaded to back this huge and costly u-turn opposed by the most distinguished thinker in the field?

When I was a crude materialist Bolshevik, I used to believe that arms manufacturers more or less ran the world. I was convinced that these merchants of death actually promoted conflict to sell their wares, like the fictional ‘Cator and Bliss’ in Eric Ambler’s popular front thrillers of the 1930s. When I abandoned this rather thuggish political position, I persuaded myself that this was rubbish(which it largely is). Arms manufacturers are just the same as any other business, most of the time.

Can this be the sordid truth behind the New Cold War?

But in the early 1990s, just as Communism itself collapsed, the Marxist world-view seems to have begun to become true again. Please read this :

Read it all, but here are some key segments: ‘American arms manufacturers, who stand to gain billions of dollars in sales of weapons, communication systems and other military equipment if the Senate approves NATO expansion, have made enormous investments in lobbyists and campaign contributions to promote their cause in Washington.

The end of the cold war has shrunk the arms industry and forced it to diversify.

But expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization -- first to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, then possibly to more than a dozen other countries -- would offer arms makers a new and hugely lucrative market.

America's six biggest military contractors have spent $51 million on lobbying in the last two years, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by the Campaign Study Group, a research company in Springfield, Va.

If lobbying costs were included from all companies that perform military-related activities, like computer and technology firms, they would dwarf the lobbying effort of any other industry. Not all of the lobbying has been for NATO expansion. The contractors have billions of dollars worth of other business before Congress. But NATO expansion has been a central concern because it offers so many opportunities.’

‘Under NATO rules, new members are required to upgrade their militaries and make them compatible with those of the Western military alliance, which oversees the most sophisticated -- and expensive -- weapons and communication systems in the world. The companies that win the contracts to provide that ''inter-operability'' to the aging Soviet-made systems in Eastern Europe will benefit enormously from NATO's eastward expansion.

Thus the sums spent on lobbying and for campaign contributions are relatively small compared with the potential benefits in the new markets provided by a larger NATO, particularly from the sale of big-ticket items like fighter aircraft.’

Well, I learned in my Soviet days that the madder something appeared to be (e.g. empty restaurants refusing trade because they were ‘full’, vodka served in teapots and poured into teacups), the more certain it was that it had, buried somewhere, a strong, simple material explanation. Have we here found the squalid, crude reason for the otherwise crazy revival of a dead conflict in the heart of Europe?

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19 February 2017 1:18 AM

It will not be long now before a prison officer is killed on duty in a British jail. There will be a lot of shock and feigned horror on the part of politicians. And then it will happen again. And then we will get used to it.

The great pretence, that our society has crime and disorder under control, cannot continue much longer. It could only really last when the public had not seen in detail what goes on in our prisons.

But in last week’s BBC Panorama programme, brave reporter Joe Fenton took a job as an officer and filmed the reality of Northumberland prison. This is not some especially bad place. I suspect it is pretty typical.

Anyone who saw it now knows that the comforting fantasy of TV’s Porridge is now nothing but nostalgia. Disorder, drug-taking and danger were constantly present.

Basic security was breached. Drugs and other contraband were easily smuggled in. Attempts to prevent this were met with dangerous attacks on officers by outside criminals. Prisoners openly threatened staff, and got away with it.

The smoke from illegal drugs was so dense on some corridors that one officer was overpowered by it and was taken, unconscious and twitching, to hospital.

Officers did not dare enforce the rules or assert themselves, because they knew that they were perilously outnumbered and would be overpowered – and perhaps worse – if they did.

Meanwhile, attempts to ‘educate’ the prisoners were pathetic beyond belief. Some inmates were shown colouring in Peppa Pig cartoons. I have visited prisons in several parts of the world, including Russia, the USA and South Africa. All had their faults and problems, and all made the heart sink. But in two visits to British prisons, including a day spent in Wormwood Scrubs, I long ago detected an undercurrent of menace, only kept from bursting into full life by the presence of experienced and resolute staff.

At that time, the officers were still more or less in control, at least by day. I do not think that they are now. Prisoners are obviously inside so that they can be punished – but punished lawfully and by authority, not by other criminals.

In these places of menace and despair, the suicide rate is flying upwards – 119 since last year, and a total of 1,864 since 1992. This is far greater than the number of executions we used to have (seldom more than 15 a year), but Left-wing liberals, in practice, accept it.

They secretly know it is the price of their policies.

Last year there was a 40 per cent rise in assaults on staff and a 28 per cent increase in prisoner-on-prisoner assaults, plus a 23 per cent increase in incidents of self-harm, to a total of 37,784.

Many experienced staff have either given up or been made redundant. New recruits are carrying out grave responsibilities within a few weeks of starting work.

I do not know how closely this is connected with the privatisation of prisons. I will come to that. But when the absurd ‘Justice Secretary’, Liz Truss, said last week ‘I want to transform our prisons from places of violence and despair to places of self-improvement and hope where all prisoners are given the chance to lead a better life’, I could hear the low hum of pigs flying overhead in tight formation.

As I was considering this, word reached me that at Forest Bank Prison in Salford (like Northumberland it is run by the private contractor Sodexo), inmates were being given a leaflet explaining to them how to take drugs ‘safely’ (as if it was ever safe).

While it says the best way to avoid danger is not to take these things at all, it then more or less accepts that they will. ‘If you snort,’ it says, ‘chop powders finely first. Don’t inject but if you do, don’t share works (needles) with other people.’

Sodexo, which as far as I can discover is a French food-services company which has gone into the custody business (why not give the job to a chain of bookies, or a payday loan company, or a supermarket giant?), issued the following pathetic statement, which made me yearn for the lost days of nationalisation.

‘We have security policies in place and our staff work really hard to keep drugs out. However, the reality is drugs are an issue in prisons and we have a duty of care to our prisoners. Therefore, we provide advice and support to reduce levels of harm in the prison.’

But what of Ms Truss’s ‘Justice’ Ministry with its soppy dreams of ‘self-improvement and hope’?

When I called them, they immediately tried to pass the buck to Sodexo, as if by privatising the prison they had shrugged off all responsibility for it. Eventually, they emitted this feeble, untrue statement: ‘We have a zero tolerance approach to drugs in our prisons and those who are caught in possession of them can expect to spend longer behind bars.’

This is the end of all their weakness – the absent, uninterested police, the millions of crimes and disorderly actions ignored, unrecorded and unpunished, the useless cautions, the non-existent ‘war on drugs’, the tagging and the feeble fake sentences, the unpaid fines and flabby ‘community service’.

All these years of soppy failure and buck-passing finally drain into the hideous, blocked sump of our useless, miserable prisons, where they will, one day soon, explode in all our faces.

The image we foolishly try to ignore

This picture of an assassin moments after his crime must be one of the most striking and memorable photographs ever taken.

It shows an act of terror – the murder by an Islamist fanatic of Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey.

The man who took it, Burhan Özbilici, was rightly honoured for it last week. He had no idea the killer would not turn on him.

But, unlike other pictures of terror outrages, this one has somehow not been used very much.

I think this is because of the crazy wave of anti-Russian feeling which many in the media and in politics have been stoking. Most people now believe, falsely in my view, that Russia is an aggressive power which deliberately targets civilians in war.

And so we do not disapprove quite as much as we should of this particular murder, because its victim was a Russian. Well, I do.

Russia is, in fact, our ally against this sort of fanaticism. That is why Mr Karlov died. We should realise this before we are drawn into a foolish and dangerous conflict with Moscow.

Why Blair must never be allowed near a cute kitten

Can someone tell the Blair creature that his support is worse than the kiss of death to any cause? He could make people hate fluffy kittens if he was photographed with one.

The only purpose of his public appearances is to allow another waiter or barman to make a citizen’s arrest for war crimes.

Get back on the plane to Kazakhstan, Anthony, and make another speech to a congress of disinfectant manufacturers.

It’s your fate from now on.

*******

Donald Trump will just walk out one day

Now more than ever I am sure that Donald Trump will walk out of the White House (blaming someone else) long before his term is up. He’ll just call a press conference and go. I don’t believe he ever wanted or expected to win, and I think he is utterly bemused by the job. One of his forerunners, Harry Truman, said of cruel, merciless Washington DC that ‘If you want a friend here, get a dog’. Mr Trump has only just begun to discover how many ways DC has of tripping him up in public.

*********

I wish we’d stop boasting about how we spend more on defence than other Nato members.

Parliament’s Defence Committee reported last year that our figures were only achieved by ‘moving the goalposts’, such as including Defence Ministry pensions.

Our real spending on troops and ships is miserable.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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15 February 2017 2:17 PM

Have you noticed that there is no alliance to counter the threat posed by Austria-Hungary? Why ever not? It only ceased to exist in 1918, and Austria is still there maintaining a grandiose capital in Vienna. Who knows when there might be a resurgence of Habsburg power?

To me, such an alliance makes just as much sense today as NATO does in the Year of Grace 2017. Now, unlike most modern NATO enthusiasts, I go back a long way with this organisation. In the mid-1980s it was as fashionable in British politics and media to favour nuclear disarmament as it is now to despise and fear Russia. And it was as unfashionable then to back NATO, is it is now to point out that Russia doesn't actually threaten us. I was right then. I think I'm right now. When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?

Almost everyone I met or knew back then was against the installation of American cruise missiles in Britain, and of Pershing-2 missiles in Germany. The BBC and much of the press gave vast and sympathetic coverage to the Greenham Common ‘Peace Camp’, a ramshackle township of mainly female leftists which sought to prevent the deployment of cruise missiles at the airfield there. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which had until then been a dusty relic of the 1950s, revived. Joan Ruddock became a major figure, as did Monsignor Bruce Kent, never off the TV.

I thought the Greenham Common ‘peace camp’ was a disgrace and a folly. I supported deployment of cruise missiles there. I thought they were an essential counterweight to the SS-20 'Pioneer' rockets being installed in Eastern Europe at the time by the USSR.

While all my Oxford neighbours had ‘No Cruise’ stickers on their cars and houses, I actually persuaded a friend at NATO HQ in Brussels to send me some rare NATO bumper stickers to put on my car. I believed then, as I believe now, that without a European-based nuclear counterweight to the SS-20s, deterrence would falter and the huge conventional power of Soviet forces then in Germany would compel Western Europe to fall under Moscow’s influence.

I believe the failure of the (Soviet-backed) campaign to prevent cruise installation was the beginning of the end of Soviet power.

And I rejoiced to see NATO’s victory.

So I was astonished, after Soviet Power had gone the way of the Habsburgs, to find that the defensive alliance, created in response to the Soviet Threat, was not only still in existence, but also expanding.

The only result was to irritate Moscow, which had, in the years since the collapse of the USSR, made absolutely no significant threat to those states formerly in its power which had become independent. Find me any evidence of such a threat, if you can. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland had cast off Soviet influence in 1989, along with East Germany and Romania. I was there. I saw it happen. I rejoiced at it.

The Baltic states cast off Soviet power in 1991. Likewise, I was there, I saw it happen. I rejoiced at it.

Name me, if you can, any event of any importance between 1989 and 1999 (when these capitals became NATO capitals) which gave Prague, Budapest or Warsaw the slightest reason to suspect that a revanchist Moscow sought to reconquer them.

Likewise, name me, if you can, any reason for Sofia, Bucharest, Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius or Bratislava to fear a Russian reconquest between 1991 and 2004, the years these capitals became NATO capitals.

The point about the original, proper, sensible NATO was that it was a *reaction* to the clear and obvious actions of the USSR, which had in a series of rigged elections and coups d’etat turned all the states in what was to become the Warsaw Pact into Communist dictatorships.

NATO’s foundation in 1949 was a defensive response to a palpable aggression, perhaps most miserably shown in the putsch which destroyed the last vestiges of liberty in Prague in 1948.

It made no boasts of plans to roll back Soviet power. It had none, and indeed sat and did nothing when the USSR crushed risings in Poland , East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and when it built the Berlin Wall, Nothing. It was a defensive alliance. It said, credibly, ‘Take one step further, and we will fight’.

Then, its famous Article Five was entirely believable. It was guaranteed by large US, German and British forces stationed permanently in the path of any further Western advance, crucially backed up by a clear threat of nuclear war (renewed and restated by the arrival of cruise missiles at Greenham Common and RAF Molesworth).

These forces were dismantled after 1989 because there was clearly no more need for them. But, while it was easy to disband one of the biggest armies ever assembled on earth, it proved much harder to get rid of a few hundred bureaucrats in Zaventem, in the suburbs of Brussels. They are still there. Why?

Although NATO no longer had any serious forces, it became noisier and noisier, in the way of empty vessels, and accrued more and more members. I will be turning in a future blog to Peter Conradi’s interesting new book ‘Who Lost Russia?’, but I will just mention here that he says there were major political lobbies in the USA for NATO expansion, which do not seem to have been entirely unconnected to weapons manufacturers hoping to sell their wares to the new members.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The new NATO (unlike the proper version I recall and defended against modish criticism) had almost no muscle at all. It had and has no serious conventional military bulk to deter a conventional war and provide a series of tripwires between tension and a nuclear exchange. It really has nothing but British, French and American H-bombs, which it does not actually control.

Its promise to stand by any member if attacked, once credible because of the compactness of the organisation and its acceptance of the status quo, is now totally incredible. No US President will actually sacrifice Chicago for Bucharest or Riga or even Warsaw. No French president will sacrifice Paris for Tallinn. No British prime minister will sacrifice London for Vilnius. the danger is that irresponsible, demagogic governments in these states (not impossible to imagine) might think that the pledge is genuine, and act accordingly -as Poland acted in 1939, after the worthless, empty, lying Anglo-French guarantee. Whoever benefited from that heroic piece of idealism and crazy courage, it certainly wasn't Poland, which to all intents and purposes disappeared from the map soon afterwards, amid hideous terror and slaughter.

So the NATO promise ti the new NATO states, (in the long history of grandiose, stupid guarantees made by this country when it had no intention of keeping them) is actively destabilising.

Let me provide a sort of example: The absurd 2008 war which Georgia started against Russia (Yes it did, do your homework, the EU’s independent Tagliavini report clearly concluded that Georgia started it) .

Here we have a small, powerless country close to Russia , led by an immature and romantic figure who had come to power in a mob putsch, thinking that he could gain an advantage over Russia by dragging the NATO powers into a conflict with Moscow.

Luckily for us, good sense prevailed. Moscow responded, counter-attacked and then withdrew. The Western powers were too sensible to be dragged in, though I seem to remember a certain Tory leader grandstanding a bit. But it could very easily have been otherwise, and had Georgia been (as it sought to be and as some people had seriously suggested ) a NATO member, we could actually have seen a shooting war between US and Russian troops in the Caucasus.

Maybe you fancy that. If so, I recommend a cold compress, a darkened room, a trip to a war cemetery and (if that doesn’t calm you down) a visit to a hospital for war-wounded civilians and soldiers, anywhere (there are plenty to choose from in this idealistic age).

I am (as anyone who covered the fall of the USSR must be) sympathetic to the nations and people who emerged blinking from the Soviet prison-house after 1989 and 1991. For many months of 1991 I actually hated the company of Russians because of what I had seen the Soviet Army do in Vilnius. I had rejoiced at the fall of the hammer and sickle in Bucharest, Prague and Budapest, and run, with the defiant crowds, from the People ‘s Police during anti-Communist demonstrations in East Berlin.

But I absolutely cannot see how rebuilding NATO helps to keep these nations safe or free. I share the view of Professor Richard Sakwa, which is that the rebuilt NATO has fed and stoked the very fear from which it claims to guard its new members.

Russia has legitimate concerns. It has plenty of recent experience of being invaded, including the starvation siege of Leningrad, now St Petersburg. This city is just 84 miles from Narva, the border town at the eastern edge of NATO Estonia.

Look it up on a map . How would Sir Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, feel if the West Midlands declared independence from the UK, and soon afterwards there were Russian troops stationed in, say, Coventry, which is as far from London as Narva is from St Petersburg? Not happy, I’d guess.

Russia’s sensitivity about hostile armies on its borders is not some sort of pathology, but a perfectly reasonable position. If we continue to treat it with contempt, we will make trouble where no trouble was, and live to regret it. And for what reason? What do we gain from this? We, who massage our defence expenditure by cramming the intelligence budget and some pensions into it, to look as if we are spending substantially on defence when in fact we are letting our conventional forces fall apart with poverty and neglect.

Why did NATO’s pen-pushers not go home, when its soldiers did? It’s a question worth asking over and over again.

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13 February 2017 2:09 PM

Some contributors have asked me why I did not write about the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, on Sunday. I had sort of meant to, but in the end I wrote so much on other things that I had no room. I did feel the subject had been very much written about, and wasn’t sure I had anything especially new to say.

I take the widespread view that it is ridiculous for Mr Speaker to have got so worked up about Donald Trump once he had happily entertained the President of the Chinese despotism. Now that visit, by the leader of the world's biggest prison state, would have been a moment to make a fuss (the Prince of Wales, often mistaken, has to his credit done much to reveal his misgivings about Britain’s glutinous dalliance with the Chinese despotism).

Mr Bercow says he's against 'racism' and 'sexism'. These are often quite broad terms. You will have to tell me whether the decades during which Chinese baby girls were selectively massacred in the womb under the one-child policy was 'sexist', or whether China's treatment of Tibetans and Uighurs in their Chinese-occupied homelands is 'racist'. But they are certainly not very creditable.

I yield to no-one in my disdain for Mr Trump (and assure those who seem to hope otherwise that this is a genuine, profound feeling). But he is in the end the constitutionally and lawfully chosen leader of a free country, a country which makes a reasonable stab at the rule of law (though it’s by no means above criticism). He runs no secret police force, nor rigged courts nor an empire of labour camps. China does.

To object to a Parliamentary visit by President Trump, having smilingly accepted one by President Xi, is to strain at a gnat having swallowed a camel.

In penance, Mr Bercow should immediately abandon his braid-trimmed Euro-robe, in which he looks like the Burgomeister of some Rhineland dorp, and return to the proper attire of a British Speaker, knee-breeches, buckled shoes and a full-bottomed wig, worn (like a Judge's robes and wig) to emphasise that he is the holder of a great office, rather than an individual. Had he abandoned any ceremonial dress at all, his position would be stronger. The braided robe leaves him with no real defence. It was time for someone to reverse Betty Boothroyd’s mistaken decision to abandon the long horsehair headpiece, and Bercow, oddly enough, was the man to do it.

Because, you see, he is actually rather a good thing. Full disclosure: In the late spring of last year Mr Bercow invited me to take part in a debate on the EU issue in his constituency. He drove me to the location in his own car (thus saving me the train fare to Milton Keynes and the bus fare on to Buckingham). We conversed in a friendly fashion the whole way. He is an interesting person who has lived an interesting life. I think I got a cup of tea and a biscuit as well.

I think he has done several very good things as Speaker, especially by forcing ministers to come to the Commons to answer urgent questions, a practice which really ought to have been in existence anyway, and which has brought back life to Parliament. When one considers that one past speaker was the unfortunate Selwyn Lloyd, who had actually lied to the House about Suez while Foreign Secretary in 1956, surely a disqualification from the job, Mr Bercow's annoying independence of Downing Street is a good thing in itself. I think he has given backbenchers more opportunities to speak, and I think his efforts to ensure that MPs are heard rather than shouted down by whip-organised claques have been creditable and partly successful.

More important, many of the media attacks on him seem to me to serve the interests of Downing Street and the Executive. In any conflict between Speaker, Parliament and executive, I never have to ask which side I am on. Nor should you

Nobody can really be in much doubt of Mr Bercow’s present politics, which are (as far as I am concerned) almost entirely mistaken and horribly politically correct. I don’t see it as much of a revelation to be told that he voted to stay in the EU. So what? The question is whether he chairs debates in Parliament in a way which is politically partial. I have seen no claims that he does so, and he has supporters and enemies, as far as I can gather, on both sides of the House. What he certainly shouldn’t be is a humble servant of the government, as some speakers, shamefully, have been.

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Once again, the ‘mainstream’ catches up with me. My 2003 book ‘A Brief History of Crime’ (since published, with some alterations, in a paperback format as ‘the Abolition of Liberty’, and now available as an e-book or as an audiobook – the audio version contains the controversial chapters on capital punishment and gun control omitted from other versions of ‘Abolition of Liberty’ ) suggested that many prisons were now run by their inmates. Tonight’s ‘Panorama’ on the BBC (if its pre-publicity is justified) rather seems to confirm this impression http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38931580

I cited in particular a report from Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons on events at Wymott, in Lancashire, where this had undoubtedly happened for a period. I suspect that at a lower and less embarrassing level it had happened more or less all the time and everywhere, after a government-approved visit to Wormwood Scrubs (the only sort the Press can normally make) , where I detected an unspoken undercurrent of anarchy (later confirmed to me by serving officers and former prisoners who contacted me privately).

But I must stress here (before the bores start circling) that making detailed criticism of prisons, or police, or anything else, does not mean I don’t realise there are other problems in society.

But they still need to be made in detail.

What my book pointed out (and events in the following 14 years have borne this out) is that prison overcrowding is a consequence of soft justice.

Feeble non-deterrent warehouses

Of course, while feeble, non-deterrent warehouse prisons such as we now maintain are worse than useless, prisons by themselves solve none of the problems of society. They were never supposed to. There will always be crimes and there will always be criminals. Alas, most of the cleverer criminals will not be caught or punished. Prisons were a recognition that some people would be so foolish, or so lacking in conscience, that they would commit crimes and be caught for them. By making examples of them, we might then deter others, who were considering crime but had not decided upon it, from breaking the law.

Idiotically, we then used prisons to punish campaigners for female suffrage, and those who objected to serving in the Great War. Their prison reminiscences (notably the powerful 1922 volume on the subject ‘English Prisons Today’, edited by Fenner Brockway and Stephen Hobhouse) , in which the injustice of their treatment was connected (in enlightened minds) with the harsh austerity of the prisons as they then were. Rather than recognising that such people should not have been imprisoned at all, the thinking classes resolved to change the prisons. This prompted mistaken calls for reform, so that we ended up with prisons designed to accommodate truculent philosophers and Hampstead thinkers, but increasingly useless against actual criminals. Indeed, they can be very cruel places for the weak and vulnerable, and even worse for the many mentally ill persons wrongly dumped in them because we have so few mental hospitals left.

The process was slow, and , like many 20th century liberal reform movements, did not really get into fourth gear until the 1960s, when politics caught up with intellectual opinion. As Home Secretary in the late 1960s, Roy Jenkins pretty much abolished the idea that there was any deterrent or punitive purpose in the prison regime. The abolition of the death penalty, itself beyond doubt punitive and deterrent rather than aimed at ‘rehabilitation’, was an essential precondition to this. From his reign onwards, the punishment consisted solely of the deprivation of liberty (or so it was said). What this has come to mean is that prisoners are now punished and disciplined by their fellow-inmates rather than by the law or the authorities.

Prison is the state’s very last resort, used too late to be of any use

It has also come to mean that prison is now a sign of administrative exasperation. Apart from homicides or child-molesters (who have become a sort of obsession of a criminal justice system deprived by liberalism of people it can disapprove of thoroughly), almost nobody goes to prison for a first offence.

Or a second, or a third. In fact it is reasonable to suppose that most British criminals arriving for the first time in prison ( often for a sentence so short in practice that they barely have time to work out where they are before they’re out again) have already committed several dozen offences.

The first dozen or so will have gone unnoticed or unrecorded by a police force anxious to avoid swelling the crime figures, and not much inclined to do anything about ‘minor’ crimes (minor in its eyes, not in the eyes of the victims).

Then there will have been a series of unrecorded warnings, recorded cautions, penalty notices, ‘restorative justice’ attempts and other Penal Episodes Not Involving Sanctions (it’s a good acronym, I think) . After that perhaps some probation and ‘community service’ . Then a suspended sentence or two. Then two or three ‘last chances’ from magistrates or judges under appalling pressure to keep the jails from bursting. And finally, in utter exasperation, a three-month sentence which actually results in a few weeks inside before being rapidly tagged and ejected back on to the street.

How can this deter anyone from doing anything?

There’s not the slightest chance of this deterring anyone from anything. For a start, those involved are hardened criminals long before they arrive at prison reception(the idea that prison is a ‘university of crime’ in which impressionable, fundamentally good young first offenders are tutored in bad ways by evil old lags is, to put it mildly, out of date).

The result, a vast population of unpunished criminals, unrecorded by fiddled crime figures, combined with a growing prison population despite the frantic efforts made to keep it down, by a) not sending anyone there if you can help it and b) letting them out as quickly as you possibly can.

The current England and Wales prison population of roughly 85,000 can only be understood with the above background.

Note past figures. Even allowing for rising population, the change is astonishing. And when you realise that in 1901 large numbers of men were in prison doing seven-day sentences for riding bicycles without lights, obscene language, sleeping rough, and drunkenness, the contrast is even more marked.

I guess that a true comparison, under which people were in prison *now*for the sort of things which would have got them put there in *1950*, would result in a prison population possibly approaching a million. But what we see here is a suppressed growth in prison population, thanks to official leniency, combined with a vast growth in crime and disorder. And this is falsely presented by government and media as a failure of a tough prison policy to work. There is no tough prison policy. Prison only ‘works’ when it is deterrent in nature, and when criminals have a genuine fear of going there. Michael Howard’s vacuous formula that ‘prison works’ because a criminal who is locked up cannot commit crime, is useless in any case, as he will soon be released. But now that so much crime is committed *in prison itself*, especially drug sales and consumption, even this isn’t true. And the ultimate proof that liberal prisons don’t work is that the inmates run the prisons.

Most people still don’t realise that there is any position apart from Lord Howard’s pathetic pretence at conservatism, and Ken Clarke’s ‘let it all hang out’ liberalism’. Whenever I am invited to broadcast on the subject I have to spend much of my time explaining that I am not a supporter of Lord Howard. Can you imagine how frustrating that is?

My attacks on feeble, reactive, absent policing, on eviscerated courts, on the disappearance of authority figures from public places and the removal of power from parents and teachers of power from adults, make up a coherent whole. They in turn fit into my wider criticism of modern Britain, its rejection of hierarchy and its destruction of Christian belief and lifelong marriage.

Once, I thought this might become a political programme for the restoration of what had been lost.

I came to realise that this wasn’t in fact possible. Most of the ‘silent minority’ who treasured conservative attitudes were not really interested in the details of social policy, and the personal obligation required in a re-Christianised society,. and so were vulnerable to mountebanks and rabble rousers, ranging from Michael ‘prison works’ Howard to Donald Trump, who offered them satisfying slogans about their worries, without letting on that anything would be required from them. All you have to do is vote for X, and X will happen. Except that it will not. Our idolatrous society casts all its cares upon leaders. Those leaders then fail, and the idolaters then move, bit by bit, to worse and worse demagogues. And people ask me why I don’t like universal suffrage democracy.

12 February 2017 1:23 AM

The BBC plans to ‘question the very concept of civilisation’ in a new and lavish TV series. Well, at least they’re being open about it this time. The promise is made by one-time Blairite commissar James Purnell, now a senior BBC mandarin. The most interesting thing about Mr Purnell is that he once managed to appear in a photograph of an event at which he had not been present.Some other MPs, who were there, said they had left a space for him to be slotted in later, though he said he had no idea this was the plan. Believe what you like. This is at least better than the old Stalinist practice of obliterating people from pictures in which they originally featured, but it is all too typical of the modern elite’s sketchy relationship with ideas of absolute truth or absolute good. Alas, he is now all-too-present at the BBC. Mr Purnell, whose former total political partiality is of course no sort of problem in the supposedly politically neutral Corporation, promises viewers: ‘We’ll turn to civilisation. Well, Civilisations – inspired by Kenneth Clark’s seminal documentary series, but in many ways the opposite of the original. Rather than a single view of civilisation, we will have three presenters. ‘Rather than looking at Western civilisation, we will look at many, and question the very concept of civilisation.’That’s interesting. Does he think there would even be a BBC unless there had been an agreed concept of civilisation in the now-forgotten, abolished Britain which first created it? Let him wander, some spring morning, out of the dreary new plastic palace (already showing its age) that the Corporation has built for itself in the centre of London, and examine its handsome original headquarters next door. There he will find an inscription in Latin, intended to be the first thing seen by everyone entering the building. I will translate the important parts of it: ‘This temple of the arts and muses is dedicated to Almighty God by the first Governors in the year of our Lord 1931… And they pray that good seed sown may bring forth good harvest, and that all things foul or hostile to peace may be banished thence, and that the people inclining their ear to whatsoever things are lovely and honest, whatsoever things are of good report, may tread the path of virtue and wisdom.’ It leaves no doubt that the stated purpose of the building and the organisation were explicitly Christian. Much of it is actually taken from the Bible. And it pretty fiercely warns that those things which are ‘foul’ or ‘hostile to peace’ are to be banished. But anyone who has many dealings with the BBC, and I have had lots, will know that its idea of what is virtuous, and its idea of what is foul (which sometimes includes me personally), have changed beyond recognition since that inscription was carved 86 years ago. That is why it now rejects the original idea of civilisation, fundamentally European and eventually Christian, which it still just about tolerated in the 1960s when Kenneth Clark’s famous series on the subject was made.But what does it favour instead? By offering us three differing ideas, and inviting us to choose which we prefer, it is not, in my view, being open-minded. It is saying above all that it no longer endorses Lord Clark’s idea, or its own founding charter. Oddly enough, back in the 1960s, its then Director General, Hugh Carleton-Greene, was the blazing unconcealed spirit of the British cultural revolution. Like others in that era, he went too far, too fast, was too obvious, and so was reined in. His successors, ever since, have been more cautious and more cunning. It looks as if they have done their job so well that they feel safe to come out into the open again. But what will they do with the old inscription, now that it is actually a lie?

***

Anti-terror cops or the new kit for teachers in our schools?

There are many falsehoods in modern Britain. One is the alleged ‘fall’ in crime figures, this week yet again exposed as a deliberate fiddle. Another is the claimed ‘improvement’ in state comprehensive schools, where in truth classroom behaviour is often appalling and learning almost impossible as a result.

When this open secret was revealed a few years ago by undercover TV cameras, the authorities responded by disciplining the brave teacher who had helped expose it.

Of course they did. What else would you expect? But now the growing chaos has led to calls for teachers to be equipped with body-cameras. Why stop there? Why not kit them out in the face-masks, goggles, helmets, bother boots, combat gear and heavy artillery sported last week by ‘police’ officers in Downing Street during a visit by the Israeli premier.

If teachers dressed like this, and could also get away with shooting or electrocuting the occasional pupil (as the police get away with shooting and Tasering the odd innocent person), exam results and general performance would soar.

I suspect there’d also be many fewer false accusations of sexual harassment, and a sharp drop in bullying.

Am I joking? I’m not really sure. The authorities will do almost anything to protect themselves, which is why the police guarding politicians dress up like Judge Dredd and drape themselves with weapons.

But any normal person seeking to live an orderly, honest life – a private citizen besieged by louts in her home, a teacher struggling to control a feral classroom, a shopkeeper plagued by incessant theft – faces arrest and punishment if he or she snaps and lashes out.

Surely it is only despotisms where the police protect the powerful, and turn a cold and brutal shoulder to the people?

***

Once again an incident first reported as terrorism turns out to be the random act of a mentally ill person. In this case it was Zakaria Bulhan, who killed retired teacher Darlene Horton, in Russell Square, London, last August. The same thing happened when the equally insane Muhaydin Mire stabbed a random victim at Leytonstone Underground station in December 2015. As it happens, many other violent acts officially designated as ‘terrorist’ have been conducted by people who were plainly mentally unhinged. And we have also seen several crimes chillingly similar to terror acts – including beheadings – but where there was no conceivable political motive.Thanks to near-total lack of interest from the police, Government and media, we seldom find out if these people have been taking drugs. Sometimes we do. Mire undoubtedly had been. But why won’t we look into this rather obvious connection? This sort of violence is new. So is the widespread use of mind-altering drugs, both legal and illegal. The same goes for the disturbing number of young people suffering from mental illness in general.It would hardly be a surprise if those who took such drugs became mentally ill. Is it the power of the very wealthy pro-drugs lobbies, on the verge of winning their campaign for legalisation, that keeps us from examining this urgent question? I suspect so.

***

I’ve worked out why the modern Left hate Donald Trump so much, and why anti-Trump parades have become the biggest boost to the Rentacrowd protest industry since the Vietnam War, opposed by millions who didn’t know what it was about or where Vietnam was. It’s because the President subconsciously reminds them of themselves. Unlike most ‘Right-wing’ figures, he adopts the habits and practices of the shouty Left. He’s shamelessly bigoted, and regards his bigotry as a virtue. He’s ignorant, materialistic, unread, foul-mouthed, sexually liberated, sees opponents as enemies to be crushed rather than as fellow citizens to be persuaded or at least respected, and he despises the rule of law.People hate in others what they dislike in themselves. I’ve seldom seen a better example of this maxim in action.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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09 February 2017 10:50 AM

Here is the text of a talk I gave to a meeting of the Kipling Society in London last night. All the poems mentioned can, I think, be easily located on the internet.

The thing that makes Kipling great, I think, is his knowledge of evil and his realisation that there is a great deal of stark horror in the world, not very far away.

I have seldom, for instance, read a better description of Hell than the Village of the Dead in ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’. All that is wrong with it is that Jukes actually escapes from the awful place (where I for one can never make up my mind if the inhabitants are living or dead). But you can see why the author might slip an escape in at the end, or the story might not easily find a buyer. The idea of eating barbecued crow forever on a stinking beach surrounded by people you hate and mistrust (and once fancied were your inferiors) is enough to drive you mad.

He knows what happens when the law and the rules go. He suspected what would happen when the Empire went (and no doubt worried greatly that it would go, and deserve to do so). He knows that we make not-very-honourable bargains with each other without admitting it. He knows that everything that seems permanent is temporary. And he understands how to keep hold of what we have, and how to lose it.

He is also acquainted with grief. You might think the little, tripping verse ‘Merrow Down’, in ‘The Just So Stories’ is ordinarily sentimental and a little mawkish until without warning it turns savage like a purring cat on your lap suddenly twisting and baring its teeth, seeking to bite

First: ‘For far- oh very far behind, so far she cannot call to him…’

and then the awful, much too personal last line:

… ‘The daughter that was all to him’ …

….wallops you in the solar plexus with real loss and sorrow. After meeting that for the first time as an adult, I searched among the facetious jests of the stories for some sort of relief to take the thing out of my mind. But it has been there ever since. It makes me want to howl.

And so it is again and again, the sense of someone who knows that the shadow may conceal a worse substance, that the noise in the night may really be something to worry about; someone who has gone at midnight down the stinking alley and seen the seething slum, who has sat at the press desk in the courtroom listening to evidence in too many murder trials, watched the cholera victims carted away to the riverbank in piles, and who is in the end far too intelligent and informed about reality to believe what he wants to believe.

There’s always something underneath, and it is always disturbing. In ‘The Land’ (as in ‘Norman and Saxon’ and ‘The Way Through the Woods’) we learn that the earth we think we own belongs to others and will in time forget us.

In ‘The Islanders’ we see that our relaxed and wealthy peace was bought by others in the past and can be claimed back from us without warning. Again, hear just once the line ‘the low red glare to the southward as the raided coast towns burn’, and I doubt you will forget it. It establishes itself permanently in the mind as an image.

I suspect this is because Kipling, when at his angriest, instinctively tries never to use words of more than two syllables, the surest way to conjure power from the language. For me the whole poem revolves around the words ‘the low red glare to the souythward’. I have thought since I first read it ‘This will happen. I may see it’, and – though my rational response to it has varied over many years – I still think so.

As for the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I envision them as small, wizened figures, wearing leering, smirking or snarling masks like African witch-doctors, assembled in a dingy brown lecture theatre of the old sort as they chalk their bitter maxims on a flaking blackboard, to a chattering, half-interested assembly. Are these cynical gods sniggering behind those masks? Very possibly. Or it may just be wheezing.

It takes many readings to notice that, though they promise ‘There are only four things certain since social progress began’ there are in fact just three of them : ‘That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, and the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire’.

I cannot be sure if this is a jest in itself, but, given that ‘two and two make four’ occurs just three lines earlier, I think it must be.

There is, from time to time, an irritating facetiousness in this poem, which weakens the force of the stark lines such as ‘the lights had gone out in Rome’ or the truly prophetic ‘till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith’.

Beside these fierce, austere lines, I could always have managed without ‘They denied that the Moon was Stilton. They denied she was even Dutch’, though ‘the first Feminian sandstones’ is (I suspect) quite a good joke

There are no jokes in the Harp Song of the Dane Women, just the bafflement of millions of abandoned wives down all the centuries, who know but hate the fact that they would not want any man who did not, at some moment at least, sicken for the life beyond hearth and acre.

It’s not just women, of course. The French say that there is always one who kisses and one who turns the cheek, and anyone who has been deserted, however good the reason, knows very well ‘the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow’ or the other noises of departure from the taxi at the door to (if we are old enough to remember the lost age of platform tickets and telegrams, as I am) , the train whistle as it goes round the curve under the bridge, strangely dead on the ear before it fades altogether.

And maybe beyond these noises, a suspicion of happy shouts, or relieved sighs as the departed one, back among less demanding companions, casts off the politely sad posture and expressions of farewell, and sinks back into an unencumbered life of adolescent self-indulgence.

Yes, there is always the one who longs to be out where the storm-clouds swallow, and would push away the hands and the arms and the kisses of those who would hold him (or her) back, and who perhaps secretly prefers a bloody death and a fiery pyre to a quiet, wrinkled, doddery end near the hearth, and a tended grave on the home acre. It must be so, or it would never happen. But like so many things in Kipling, this goes on all the time, over and over again.

And so we come to what I think is the crown of all these verses, Recessional, confirming Kipling as a prophet as well as a poet. Nineveh (near present-day Mosul, as it happens) and Tyre take us straight to the Bible because of their geography, though it is their secular history of hubris and humiliation that concerns Kipling.

Did something alarm or disgust him about the celebration of imperial power at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, the gold-braided, marching soldiers and the yelling sergeant-majors , the review of the fleet, the drunken scenes ( drunk with sight of power?) after the parade went by?

The words seem familiar already, as if quarried from Jeremiah or Job, but my own searches find only flickers of the disturbing, inescapably haunting Coverdale Psalms everyone used to hear, and everyone used to chant all the time in church.

Some of you may remember how headlines about King Zog of Albania uncover George Bowling’s memories in George Orwell’s novel ‘Coming up For Air’, reminding him of ‘Og the King of Bashan’ in the 135th and 136th Psalms and setting off a complete train of memory and most of the rest of the book . And all from one admittedly very odd word - Zog.

Phrases from Coverdale form a huge chunk of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, but nowadays almost nobody knows them at all, yet another example of common knowledge become esoteric in a couple of generations.

A ‘humble and a contrite heart’ is almost, but not quite the same as ‘a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt thou not despise’, from the 51st Psalm, the Miserere. It must be conscious, as must be the restrained substitution of ‘humble’ for the more frightening ‘broken’.

As for ‘Lest we forget’, it is astonishing to find that, as far as I can discover, it is Kipling’s own coinage. It sounds as if it comes from many centuries further down, but if it does, I do not know where.

Is it the Bible again? I suspect so. But only indirectly. The most striking warning against forgetfulness that I know is in the beautiful, savage 137th Psalm (‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept’) and its potent vows and curses

‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, yea , if I prefer not Jerusalem in my mirth.’

The end is so raw and cruel that modern psalters put the words in brackets and most cathedral choirs nowadays leave it out when it comes round in the calendar. That isn’t often these days, most of them having abandoned the ancient cycle of six psalms a day, every day.

But there was no such sensitivity or laziness in Kipling’s churchgoing childhood. He would have heard (and chanted) ‘O daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery, happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Blessed shall he be that taketh thy children and throweth them against the stones’.

Anglican congregations of the Victorian and Edwardian age would of course never have thought of doing such a thing. But Kipling had met people who might, if the circumstances had been right. And so he knew that we could do it too, if our world turned upside down.

This, he might have thought, is the sort of thing that happens when people forget.

And when we think of the final furious violence of the British Empire, as it struggled and failed to retain its lost greatness 70 years ago, by hurling bombs at German civilians, we see what he means by ‘tongues that have not Thee in awe’. Whatever would Kipling have said about Arthur Harris and Operation Gomorrah? The name itself might have caught his interest. But I don’t think he would have been surprised at the way things turned out. Nor would he have shut his mind to it, as we do. That is why we need him still.